History seems to be repeating itself as the new leader of the opposition, Arvin Boolell, will have a number of daunting hurdles and challenges that he will have to negotiate.

The first is that he is a leader of the opposition without commanding a party of his own. Opposition leaders in such an arrangement necessarily start out as diminished figures. Their role as opposition leader is dependent upon the goodwill of a party leader outside, in this case, Navin Ramgoolam. The first loyalty of his party’s MPs is not to him, but to the party leader who fielded them in the election. In other words, the Labour Party MPs that Boolell is supposed to command in parliament are there because Ramgoolam, not he, chose them. Opposition leaders without parties are not a significant handicap if it’s only for a short while, as Nando Bodha was between 2006 and 2007 or Alan Ganoo was between January and October 2013. Then it’s clear that such a leader of the opposition is only a temporary place-warmer. But if the arrangement is supposed to last an entire parliamentary term, then it gets a little tricky. And a leader of the opposition without a party of his own becomes a serious handicap.

The second problem that Boolell will face is that he is supposed to lead an opposition that has two other parties in it, the MMM and the PMSD, both of whose leaders, Paul Bérenger and Xavier Duval respectively, have served as leaders of the opposition themselves, both of whom (unlike Boolell) command their own parties in the National Assembly and both of whom are none too pleased about the reduction of their status into simple opposition MPs. This places serious limitations on the extent to which Boolell can exert his authority within the wider opposition as well.

The third problem is where history comes in. Boolell is finding himself today in much the same position as Prem Nababsing did after the 1987 election. Back then, the MMM was defeated and its leader, Paul Bérenger, lost his seat (in Quatre-Bornes, prompting his subsequent switch to the safer pastures of Rose Hill). This resulted in Bérenger running the party from outside parliament, while Prem Nababsing became the leader of the opposition between 1987 and 1991. Nababsing – just like Boolell – was an opposition leader that did not control his own party. Everybody knew the real power lay outside parliament, with Bérenger. Nababsing – just like Boolell – belonged to a minority within the Hindu community and thus limited in his ability to win over support from the ruling party. And Nababsing – just like Boolell – was an amiable, uncontroversial personality, a ‘nice guy’ without that taste for blood that is a prerequisite for opposition politics, who believed in everybody getting along in the National Assembly. The result was a remarkably uneventful five years of parliamentary politics at the end of which Nababsing – after getting along with the MSM in parliament for so many years and confusing titular roles within parliament and the party with actual control – ended up splitting away from the MMM and coming to grief after forming his own RMM.

Will Boolell be another Nababsing? Or will he be able to overcome the limitations of this arrangement and emerge as a truly effective opposition leader? Only the next five years will tell. In the meantime, he will have to grow some teeth. And fast.